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Monday, January 21, 2008

Taco Pizza

Nummy! Nummy! This is what we had for dinner last night! After eating homemade pizzas I really cannot stand eating the ones from take out or restaurants. Sometimes they taste good going down but my stomach doesn't like it afterwards and they always leave an aftertaste. So, since we have been married, we have been making homemade pizza using a recipe from our Zojirushi bread machine booklet. I wanted to try making it even healthier and read about using hard white wheat berries to make flour for pizza dough. Our co-op only had soft white which is better suited to quick breads, pie crust etc. But I decided to try it anyway and will do some looking around to see if Whole Foods or another local store has it before I try to find an Internet source.

Our first wholegrain pizza attempt was scrumptious but could still use a little tweaking in the recipe. Maybe just finding the hard white wheat, which has a little higher protein will help. I'll put the recipe that I concocted below and would love to hear any hints and suggestions:

Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

First grind enough white wheat berries into flour for the recipe's required amount.

Add ingredients to your bread machine as they recommend or adapt to non-machine method.

1 1/2 c warm water

1 1/2 T olive oil

3 3/4 c white whole wheat flour

1 T honey

1 1/2 t salt

1 t Lecithin (optional)

2 t Instant Yeast

In the Zojirushi, I used the quick dough setting. This did not seem to be quite enough rising time so we set the pan on the top of our gas stove which is warm to touch due to the pilots. We allowed it about 15 minutes additional raising time, for a total of 1 hour of dough preparation.

Divide the dough in two and roll out onto a pizza stone. This rolls out quite thin. Let raise in warm place for another 15 minutes.

While the dough is resting, make pizza sauce. Since I was using seasoned taco meat from this recipe, I did not add a lot to season. I use one small can about 6 oz of tomato sauce and this time added dried minced onion and garlic powder. Usually I use fresh onion and garlic, but since I had them in the meat, I did not. Heat the sauce to a boil and turn off. This will not look like a lot of sauce. Too much sauce makes all your toppings slide around.

Spread the seasoned tomato sauce evenly over both crusts. Distribute the taco meat as desired and add any other toppings you like. We only used sliced tomatoes as this was for the children who don't like lots of "things" on their pizza (nor does their mother).

Generally I grate and use Mozzarella cheese, but was out, so since this was a "Mexican pizza" I used Monterrey Jack. I find that cheddar is too greasy. But you can use cheese to your liking.